Vampire
by electric caterpillar
Summary: the morning of the death of celestia ludenberg. inspired by the style of rpgmaker independent horror games. rated m for sexual and disturbing content, peril and future character death
1. Midnight

Vampire, n, from the Hungarian vampir, possibly from the Turkish uber, meaning "witch;" a corpse supposed in folklore to leave its grave at night to predate on the life essence of the living, usually in the form of blood.

* * *

**Midnight**

She could not say exactly when she noticed the man - it seemed one moment he was invisible, a vapor of sour odor, and the next he was dressed in fleshly form amongst the flock of her peers, a skulking hulk in a t-shirt stretched taut over his formless stomach and breasts, hair slick with oil and combed flat against his skull, his pronounced cleft palette which divided his mouth into a canid grin, squinting out from the bouquet of maidens she stood at her from thick spectacles.

Her hand alighted on the arm of her handmaiden, an auburn-haired waif who smiled indulgently at her, but before she could speak, somehow, the man was gone, enveloped by the flotsam of costumed attendants which poured away from their little party of ruffled gowns and abundant skirts.

She almost felt someone regarding her, like ants ascending her spine, but she could not see the man any longer. The lights seemed very bright, colors too intense, and her head hurt a little.

"Will you sleep soon, Celes?" her friend was asking, her cheek rolling affectionately on her shoulder.

"Um," replied Celestia, and put the lacquered talon of her first finger into her mouth to nibble nervously. The ceiling very far overhead beyond the marble stair and thinning carpets of the wide free lobby almost seemed to ring. The svelte, perfumed and downy arms of little ladies surrounded her, caressing her, reassuring.

"I'm not tired ..." chorused their sweet mice-like voices, chirping about her in the murmur of the busy floor.

"I'm hungry ..."

"Are you going to the dance?"

"Are you going home?"

"What do you want to do?"

Celestia closed her eyes. She had not eaten in a while. She felt overstimulated and sore.

The sound of the mob, the rush and shush seethed like a tide through the voluminous hall of the convention floor, and like a tide, it seemed to overwhelm her. For a sheer instant, she was floating.

"Celes," said her friend, and she felt her little crisp pink hands on her elbows, on her cheek, in the trains of her hair.

"I feel a little tired," she confessed.

She was guided to a fainting couch, a gaudy red velvet affair which waited like a marble lion in the tall glass windows of the lobby entrance. She was fawned over, crooned to, her rabbit-shaped purse arranged in her lap, her hand patted, her forehead felt.

She thought vaguely that she could not possibly sleep as she passed out of the waking world.

Laying in display to the thinning traffic in her black frock and abundant curls, Snow White in her glass coffin dreamed she was lost in a labyrinth facsimile of her childhood home, and she felt the presence of an animal, diseased and driven from reason and ravenous for her blood, and in her oblivion, she quietly sighed.


	2. One

She first registered the taste of her mouth. It was horrid.

A strand of hair tickled the corner of her eye and her back was cramped and rubbed raw against the coarse material of her slipshod cot and she was very cold, very cold.

She opened her eyes and found to her surprise no world sprung into being about her. It was dark as the inside of her skull.

It would not have been objectionable for a young lady confronted with this to speak a little urgently to the dark, or even shout, but Celestia, to whom every ounce of control forfeited was anathema, was silent.

She lay unmoving for a long moment, looking hard into the black veil, and thinking she did not feel well at all.

An object she did not recognize lay in her lap. She sought it out with her fingertips. It felt broad, blunt, but light, soft, intricately textured. Somehow, she loathed to touch it. She stood to disperse it from her lap and needed to immediately sit again, almost swooning.

On the marble tile floor before her, her purse and its contents clattered, the noise jarring as to be painful.

She saw the candle lit; her disturbed phone amongst some coins and a bullet of lip color became an orb of light reflected in the cirrus whorls of the floor. She perceived by that humble light the vastness and emptiness of the room, of the adjacent rooms, of the network of halls overhead.

She saw the rotund form of the foreign object which has trespassed onto her person; she saw an effigy of a bear, made of inarticulate fat ovals like a human infant, severed into stark black and white by a crude seam that ran between its eyes to its crotch, and one eye permanently closed by a crooked scar of scarlet thread.

She felt the tendrils of her sense reaching in the space of the enormous structure, seeking the fingers of companions, and felt none. Repose in the seat with her chin tucked petulantly into her ruffles and curls she frowned at the mess of her feet, the very ugly mannikin which smiled stupidly at her.

She kicked it. It soared into the dark, beyond the small crystal firmament of light she resided in, and she could barely hear it tumble about on the soft carpet somewhere beyond.

She gathered her things into the gullet of her purse, a confection of glossy black leather formed into a floppy-eared rabbit, seeing that the titanic vault of lead and glass that made her aquarium guarded her very effectively from phone reception, arranged her layers of skirts just so, pulled up her stockings.

She stood at the doors for a long time, feeling ill, feeling as if she could not understand they were locked.

They were glass and completely transparent. If committed to film, it might appear to an ignorant perviewer that she only stood beneath the immense roof for want of the need to leave.

Her face was a gaunt phantom, reflected over the zoetrope of the gray abandoned way and street. Dimly, like a vision of the afterlife, she saw far away the purple siliouettes of the tops of trees.

Her thought was to simply smash through it. Why had they shut her in? Hadn't they seen her? And why are the lights off? Surely the building, the size of a self-sufficient town of antiquity was not allowed to go unguarded in the night.

Oh, yes, Celestia realized with the immense pleasure of relief, touching her breast and palm to the thrill of cold of the sheer clear glass, certainly, there must be people present still - there must be security guards, engineers, dedicated paper pushers. It was not so late, she relayed to herself from the hourglass in her belly, which read the angle of the pull of the moon very high, very long from its grave.

It was a simple matter to discover by the light of her little electric candle whatever man had been left to assist her.

For what purpose had that cretinous icon been left on her person, on her very lap? And by whom?

Against her will, she shuddered. Her doppelganger mocked her.

* * *

It was very dark.

In the day, the large airy social solarium was so gauche as to be cozy, like an eccentric grandmother's parlor. The wide clear expanses of white marble tile floors, ostentatious stair and earth red and intricately patterned carpeting, only occasionally marked by a meeting of inoffensive high-backed plush chairs around a tea table or a ficus in a voluptuous china pot, were transformed by the blue spotlight of her phone into a waste lit by an alien moon, devoured by the crawling dark, and combed by crouching goblins with serpentine shadows. Her footsteps even softened by the carpet sounded very loud.

She found around the bend the bar of the receptionist's desk, the little island which boasted like buried treasure the public telephone, but from its receiver discerned only the distant murmur of her own tepid blood.

Inwardly, she cursed. Outwardly, performing for the phantoms, she tightened the corners of her habitual heart-shaped frown to demonstrate her displeasure.

"Excuse me," she said aloud to the closed door beyond the desk, knowing it would be to no avail. It was, but her own voice sounded strange to her, very small, very young, and it almost sounded frightened.

That made her angry. She might have thrown the telephone, snapping its cord like an efficient midwife and smashing it against the wall. She pivoted to approach her prey, wearing her mask of composed sweetness which cracked, and through the crack she shouted out loud into the palm of her hand, which lept to her mouth.

The bear-thing, the doll with a simulated gouged-out eye, grinning at her, a jolly, happy, gentle grin, as if it knew her, as if it loved her, sat arranged in the eye of blue light she cast on the spot the telephone once resided.

In its place was the guardian of a folded slip of lined paper.

Celes struck it, and stamped the face of the thing where it landed on the ground. She kicked it away with an urgency that upset her, almost tore the paper into snow without so much as glancing at it, so furious was she. She couldn't recall feeling this kind of anger before, which seemed to be cooking her. She wanted to scream.

Someone had done it! she realized, someone had seen her, pursued her, someone in the dark with her.

She had to sit, abruptly, on the floor before the little crystal table. She thought vaguely she must look as if she were worshiping the contents of the paper which still lay undisturbed in the dish the phone was once displayed. She thought of every incident of sensational rape and murder she had ever read of, flashing through her in the form of a groaning grimace. She thought, bizarrely, of her mothers legs, how thin and long and fine they were, how white, like her own flesh she had knitted for her, in her image.

She thought to herself, with the great gravity of her extraordinary will, that she would kill any person which approached her, with her teeth, with her nails, with her cunning, she would rend him apart, like a harpy, she would devour him.

A wave of nausea almost unseated her. She swayed.

The option of shouting aloud for help slipped unformed out of her mind, so foreign to her was the idea of that kind of display.

She checked her phone in vain for a centimeter of reception.

The letter read:

"_This bud of love, by summer's ripening breath,_

_"May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet_."

She handled it with the forceps of her long nails of her thumb and forefinger. She showed dainty apathy in her gestures, as if to some woolen creature of no consequence she passed crushed by a car along the wayside, but in fact she felt as if she might vomit.

She needed to leave. She needed to get out, right now. She needed to carry a chair to the door and open it with her limbs and call the police and her mother.

She breathed her reply, a sickened hiss, the omen of her lovingly cultivated womanly sound soothed her, only a little, but it did. She could stand. She did not even tremble.

* * *

Did the center host guests like a hotel? She could not disprove it. It was very large, many floors tall, and she had only visited the first floor, the spacious lobby and little rim of noise-proofed council rooms, and the second, containing many more rooms for meeting and the grand ball room. There were at least five more floors.

What could they contain if not guests? She wished to God she recalled exactly what the center was called - was it a hotel? Was it a hotel?

Any way ... she felt calmer now. She really did not want to make a spectacle of herself by erupting out of the building like some rampaging troglodyte.

Why should she? It would be a trifle to find an occupied room.

For the first time, Celestia wished she had consented to carry the ugly puggish taser her mother had given her the year she turned fourteen.

Certainly, there was no one there. For all she knew, the stuffed thing had arrived on the table the first time she expelled it. The disgusting sentiment had of course been left there hours before, days before she was ever present.

Ah, but where was the phone, the marble idol pulchritudinous and cold?

What did it matter? she thought savagely, reprimanding herself, what ever did it matter? She would leave within ten minutes, within minutes, she would escape.

This council took place in near silence, in an orb of blue electric light which ascended slowly the white marble stair like a drop of St. Elmo's fire recalled to heaven. Celestias little heels, little square cherry-red heels she had found so enchanting enshrined in the boutique window clicked on the marble, and it sounded bad to her, ominous, a pick on ice, a wilderness sound.

How strange to be alone in such a large place in the world today, she thought, and an evil, wheedling voice in the root of her skull, something impoverished and undeveloped and vaguely avian corrected her; it said, you are not alone.

The flight of the stair stopped at the second floor boulevard. She was not well acquainted with the path and waited a while at the lip of the halls.

Obviously, she must find the elevator.

She did not like the idea of entering a small space she did not know, not at all.

She wanted to sit a while, to prepare her replies to what her secret heart felt sure stalked her even now, to concoct prose to disturb him, magic words to endow her with a Tiamatic ferocity, to show her total fearlessness, but she felt the urgency of her quest like a fish feels the reel. She felt afraid.

She should abandon herself like a sinking ship, she felt the notion nibbling her, leap out of sense, out of the beautiful doll she had spent her little life preparing, she should scream until she sprayed blood, bludgeon open walls, but she wouldn't, she wouldn't, she wouldn't.

Holding her torch aloft, she entered the gloom of the narrow hall.

The Ballroom, announced smugly above pronounced double doors, was chained and bolted.

Its perimeter led her on a promenade around the prolonged length of the floor. She heard no human voice. She heard almost nothing at all. Her head might have been hidden beneath her pillow.

She detected no flower of paleness, no light or fair hand drifting in the sea of perfect dark. The hall seemed very small around her, the block of the grand room at her hand seeming a malevolent vacuum, the threat of annihilation barely and momentarily contained in the reliquary of unassuming walls.

I am walking to heaven, she thought.

Her lamp light slid over a small perfunctory plaque which announced the approach of the elevator grotto.

She found them, twins with sliding doors elaborated with curls of mother of pearl on either side of a china dish of lilies, glowing blue in her portable moon.

Of course, they did not respond to her. The arrow button remained empty and dark as a bowl.

She smashed the dish of lilies, which burst into a sphere of dazzling white stars on the carpet. She ground the lilies beneath her heel and found they were fabric. She hit the doors with her knee and hip until they dented.

The elevator was silent still. Miserably, she hiccuped.

She turned. She looked into the dark. So vast it seemed beyond her little blue-white globe, so quiet, so quiet, so quiet.

That quiet was deceptive. She knew intuitively she was pursued.

The impulse to rush the dark, claws upturned, sieved through of her, leaving a grit of sore and sorry exhaustion she trod upon most tenderly. She dithered back and forth, pathetically, lost.

She found the emergency stair around the bend, beyond unassuming locked doors beyond which she heard the homey humming of something heating, the heavy hydraulic fire door which hissed open at her touch.

How good to close it behind her, to feel its masculine unyielding weight on her shoulders. How good to stand with her back to the wall.

She dared not look over her shoulder, dared not peer through the arrow slit of netted window in the fire doors breadth; she knew somehow she would see something she would not want to see.

The depth of the dark beneath and above alarmed her. She could not look into it. She fairly sprang up the spare concrete steps. Their form was ugly to her, upsetting, somehow, skeletal. The unfinished metal bar of the handrail was too cold too be touched.

She burst into the third floor hall and she reinflated.

A spring of hope became a radiant pink in the lips of the frosted blossoms of her black soil; she felt color returned, energy in her step, breath large and lovely billowing in her; in the little light, she saw doors and doors and doors, announcing in copper filigree the number of her attendants; 101, 102, 103 ...

"Hello," she said to 101, and she disliked the quickness of her voice, the intensity, how undignified! but she was so happy, so happy, she flushed with eagerness. She turned to 102 across the hall.

"Hello, excuse me," said she, and knocked briskly. She thought she heard the absence echo within.

Had 101 been ajar?

Certainly, it was not closed now. She saw the lead finger of the lock untucked on the frame.

Ah, arose the mist, the uncaring cold, the gaunt specter of winter she felt in her blood, in the frantic canary of her heart. She stood in the door in the deep silent dark and looked.

She saw herself, her own image, the false lashes and curls and snow white snip of chin of her mother, represented in astonishing high definition, flat upon the wall, and again at angles in a miniature museum of glossy prints, arranged on the adjacent wall, again and again and again, oh God, her arriving at the event in the town car, her mingling with her flock of maidens which seemed like the characters of a novel now, her cheek turned in a green park, her white shoulder and throat at a pool, her in her school clothes opening the door of her home in the old wild woods, when had these been taken? She looked like a child. She made a sound very like a sob and caught it in the palm of her hand.

A sodden lump of porcelain limbs collected in a corner, wearing manicured black curls very like hers, its parts ragged with abuse, spotted with a kind of sticky milk. The skirt of the uniform of the school she attended at eleven years old.

Wads of tissue on the floor, crinkled cellophane and tinself, refuse everywhere, encrusted in food, encrusted in other substances, an evil smell, a heavy greasy putrid stink, shiny thick thumbprints, stained sheets bound about something, her face, her face, her face.

It was that cycloptic, smiling idol, that nauseating doll, it sat on the floor amongst the rabble and shyly it smiled, it followed her! It followed her! Laughing, laughing, it was that stupid, insectile smile that the man made at her!

That cloven-lipped bespectacled man, spare shiny hair, the powerful sour odor, fetid, rotten fat, the perfect white prism of light like a maggot on the iris of his narrow black eye!

For an instant, she did not recognize the knife of light which fell suddenly across the stinking squalor the shrine of her; it looked like her sight was hooked and tore as she collapsed out of the world, but its meaning struck suddenly and profoundly and she found her feet alighting even as she continued to look and wonder, mutely, she made out the shape of his sphere warped by setting light, of his large, slow, foolish hands, she felt led out of the unholy room, silently as a tiptoeing fawn, and she was running, and running, and running, with a gyroscope in her guts and a glacier erupting in her breast and a waterfall in her ears, she ran.


End file.
